IBM, Together AI ink $240 million deal for Nvidia-powered AI inference cluster

IBM and startup Together AI have signed a $240 million multi-year agreement to build a large-scale artificial intelligence cluster on IBM Cloud using Nvidia systems, the companies said on Tuesday.

The cluster will provide inference for open-source AI models, ‌which have ⁠gained ⁠traction as businesses seek to rein in AI costs and weigh concerns about cybersecurity incidents involving models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta.

Inference, the process of running trained AI models to generate responses, has become one of the largest drivers ​of demand for computing capacity, prompting ⁠cloud providers ‌and chipmakers to spend billions of ​dollars expanding ​AI infrastructure.